Big Hero 6 | November 7, 2014 | Now available on home video

[humanscrabble]

On the other hand, like many others I thought it could and would do better. It's less of an expectation and more of a hope, but even so from this perspective I'm a bit disappointed that it didn't break out beyond the more "realistic" expectations. With WDAS, Disney in general, and superhero movies being so hot--and with some such movies having exceeded expectations this summer--I thought that Big Hero 6 was in a good position to gross more like what Pixar movies typically gross, but unfortunately that didn't happen, and likely won't unless the movie's spectacular holiday performance carries over with really strong late legs (something to watch for).

 

Hm...while it is true that some superhero movies really knocked things out of the ballpark such as The Avengers, Guardians of the Galaxy, the Spider Man movies, and the Dark Knight movies, in the past few years, there were other superhero movies featuring characters that were arguably more high profile than any character in the Big Hero 6 comic series that underwhelmed at the domestic box office such as the Thor movies, X-Men: First Class & X-Men: Wolverine, and the first Captain America movie. Big Hero 6's domestic gross is likely to surpass that of the Thor movies, the first Captain America movie, The Amazing Spider Man 2, and exceed or come close to matching the domestic grosses of the X-Men movies. 

 

Also, just considering unadjusted grosses alone, of the 14 movies that were released by Pixar, only six of these movies grossed above $250 million at the domestic box office on their initial runs, two of which were sequels. BH6's domestic gross will probably wind up somewhere between Wall-E's and Brave's domestic grosses. Being Pixar releases and all, I'm genuinely curious as to whether people also felt that Wall-E and Brave failed to surpass domestic box office revenue expectations when they were first released   . 

 

The thing is, with the exception of Frozen, WDAS hasn't produced a full length animated feature that has cruised comfortably past the $200 million mark at the domestic box office for the past 20 or so years. Frozen might have garnered legions of fans and renewed recognition for WDAS among some groups of individuals, but the amount of hype and exposure that Frozen had received could just as easily have turned other cynical/jaded (?) groups of individuals away from the WDAS brand. Thus, I felt that a domestic gross of $200 million was a wild card and just hoped that BH6 could exceed the $200 million mark domestically.

 

 

I'll take boring over lamenting over what went wrong, but even with a successful run, we can still talk about how it might have been better (unprovable though that may be).

 

I also wonder what Frozen's final domestic gross would have looked like if its release date had been swapped with Monsters University's summer release date. Although Frozen's whole wintry theme might seem at odds with a summer release date, and it would have faced competition from Despicable Me 2, most children also did not need to go to school for at least 3-4 consecutive weeks on end. Could it have surpassed Toy Story 3's and even Shrek 2's unadjusted domestic grosses?

 

 And Big Hero 6 had a lot more competition than Wreck-It Ralph did in late December, but still performed MUCH better than the latter, and relatively speaking much better than itself before the additional competition came along (i.e. I doubt that the competition has hurt it). Meanwhile, HTTYD 2 had no real competition (and is actually a good DWA movie ) but underperformed in the DOM market (OS made up for it and then some, but its DOM gross was weak)--even in comparison to "realistic" expectations--anyway (i.e. the lack of competition in no way implies success).

 

I wonder if this is due in part to the "contrast effect", i.e., that general audiences felt that the other functional alternatives such as POM, Annie or Night at the Museum 3 were really really terrible especially when compared with/contrasted against BH6, and made them all the more likely to eschew repeat viewings/first time viewings of these three family movies in favor of repeat and first time viewings of BH6 over the holiday season. In this unique instance, could it be that "bad" competition helped a "good" movie's box office performance more so than if this "good" movie faced no competition from other family movies?

Edited December 30, 2014 by humanscrabble

[Dingdong123]

I'm actually hoping for a great longevity by January afterwards. Wreck-it Ralph was helped by the fact that it was a frontrunner of the animated movies in the awards season. Big Hero 6 might not have that shot (Lego Movie seems to take it) but the fact that it's showing incredible longevity means the public is connecting with it very much.

[Blankments]

Saw this today.

 

WHY HAVEN'T YOU GUYS BEEN HYPING FEAST??? Seriously, that was the best part of this experience, even though I liked the movie itself. Feast is probably the best short Disney has done yet in this new Renaissance; it legitimately made me break down crying at the end.

[Blankments]

woops

Edited December 31, 2014 by Blankments

[Blankments]

woops again 

Edited December 31, 2014 by Blankments

[Spidey Freak]

Saw this today.

 

WHY HAVEN'T YOU GUYS BEEN HYPING FEAST??? Seriously, that was the best part of this experience, even though I liked the movie itself. Feast is probably the best short Disney has done yet in this new Renaissance; it legitimately made me break down crying at the end.

 

To be honest, I was expecting more from Feast because of the insane hype it was generating from preview screenings. It ain't Paperman. And it lacked the technical novelty of Get A Horse!

[MovieMan89]

I'll tell you guys what for sure would have caused the film to earn more, more surefire than a Thanksgiving release date: Frozen level lack of direct competition. Annie, Night at the Museum, Penguins, and Into the Woods all went after the exact same target audience this Holiday and will likely combine to over 400m DOM when they're finished. The anemic Walking With Dinosaurs is what Frozen had to deal with last Holiday, all whopping 36m of it. And please don't bring up PG-13 blockbusters that are not directly aimed at families. The Hobbit movies for example have had a hard enough time even attracting teens, let alone kids. They are certainly not comparable as direct competition for Holiday family movies. These legs for this have been downright phenomenal when all the direct competition is factored in. Very similar to Tangled's run in a Holiday season that was ever fiercer for family competition than this one.

Edited December 31, 2014 by MovieMan89

[Blankments]

To be honest, I was expecting more from Feast because of the insane hype it was generating from preview screenings. It ain't Paperman. And it lacked the technical novelty of Get A Horse!

I strongly disagree. Paperman is amazing, but I actually cried at Feast. Love love loved it.

 

Get a Horse is overrated btw

[Spidey Freak]

I'll tell you guys what for sure would have caused the film to earn more, more surefire than a Thanksgiving release date: Frozen level lack of competition. Annie, Night at the Museum, Penguins, and Into the Woods all went after the exact same target audience this Holiday and will likely combine to over 400m DOM when they're finished. The anemic Walking With Dinosaurs is what Frozen had to deal with last Holiday, all whopping 36m of it. And please don't bring up PG-13 blockbusters that are not directly at families. The Hobbit movies for example have had a hard enough time even attracting teens, let alone kids. They are certainly not comparable as direct competition for Holiday family movies.

 

Uh, give it up already. You've been harping on this for over a year now. Frozen became a beastly phenomenon because of the songs and characters, with every little girl (and her brother) going "I wanna see this coz all of my friends have seen it and are talking about it!" Walking with Dinosaurs, Nut Job and then Lego could have made a dent in Frozatar legs but they didn't. Let's throw in Free Birds too if Annie's potent is going to be invoked. The only thing that finally brought the monster down was the DVD/Blu-Ray release. 

[Spidey Freak]

I strongly disagree. Paperman is amazing, but I actually cried at Feast. Love love loved it.

 

Get a Horse is overrated btw

 

I just love the technical accomplishment of GaH. Feast is... I dunno, I was expecting a heartwrenching, poignant first 4 minutes of Up kind of deal because of what the reviews were vaguely saying. So was kind of disappointed at the typical happy ending.  

 

Still think Paperman is numero uno when it comes to cinematic shorts. It was trailblazing through and through.

[Blankments]

One thing that could've made Feast better and what actually made me start crying is that the

lighting in the last scene with the first kid made the dog look much older. I was hoping we were gonna see an old, tired, Winston ushering a young baby, like circle of life type stuff. Turned out it was just odd lighting because he was back to normal looking in the next scene

 

Still, maybe I'm just a dog person but I thought it was a genius idea executed to perfection. Yes, I'm being hyperbolic deal with it

[Melvin Frohike]

I'm hoping Big Hero 6 get's nominated for an Oscar.  However, the chances of it winning are not in its favor as How to Train Your Dragon 2, LEGO Movie, and The Tale of Princess Kaguya are all big contenders and each movie has been praised immensely by critics, the latter even being one of the most acclaimed animated film in a long time.

Yes, the awards competition is a lot tougher this year than last year, when Frozen was a virtual lock for the award (unless the AMPAS would have gone for The Wind Rises instead, which was unlikely for a variety of reasons, or they went stupid, which isn't without precedence ). I would say that the odds of winning each award for this year, including the Best Animated Feature Oscar, are not in any of these movies' favor (i.e. one will win, obviously, but none of them are individually more likely to win than not).

 

Top Oscar nominees for Best Animated Feature (Predictions):

 

~ LEGO Movie

~ How To Train Your Dragon 2

~ Big Hero 6

~ The Tale of Princess Kaguya (winner)  

~ ???

 

I'm sure the LEGO Movie will win the Oscar over The Tale of Princess Kaguya but I'm also certain both Big Hero 6 and How To Train Your Dragon 2 will give both movies a run for their money.

They each have their strengths over the others, so which will win depends on which more of the AMPAS members go for over the others. And believe me, the vast majority of them don't care a whole lot about this award category, so little effort and thought will go into their votes (even less than usual, which is little to start with), whatever this may imply.

 

To me, this year was a very poor year for animated features box-office wise, probably because everyone's trying to recover from the Frozen Fever (lol) but that does not disregard the fact that many of the animated features released this year were some of the best in terms of substance in my opinion.

I actually think that this aspect is a bit overrated, personally (there have been stronger years for sure), although 2014 was definitely a stronger year in this way than 2013 overall. For me, last year was all about Frozen (among the major animated releases, that is), as everything else underwhelmed to some degree, but there were several really good animated features released this year.

[MovieMan89]

Uh, give it up already. You've been harping on this for over a year now. Frozen became a beastly phenomenon because of the songs and characters, with every little girl (and her brother) going "I wanna see this coz all of my friends have seen it and are talking about it!" Walking with Dinosaurs, Nut Job and then Lego could have made a dent in Frozatar legs but they didn't. Let's throw in Free Birds too if Annie's potent is going to be invoked. The only thing that finally brought the monster down was the DVD/Blu-Ray release. 

Oh god, your Fr-orgasm is tired. I wasn't even talking about Frozen's success individually by saying that this could have made way more with the lack of competition Frozen had. I was talking about this movie's success. I'm sorry but you're the most blinded fanboy of that movie ever if you think other Holiday family movies with huge competition are on an even playing field as Frozen at the box office. Do you really think there is infinite money to go around for a particular demographic at the Holidays? The answer is no. Movies all directly targeting the family demo in such a short span do not get to live in some independent state where all or even one can be unaffected by each other. There's only so much of the pie to go around. It doesn't matter that Annie isn't a blockbuster on its own. It joins 3 other movies released in the Holiday season and directly targeted at BH6's audience to create a cumulative gross that will likely end up bigger than Frozen's.

 

So in other words, it's like if BH6 were competing directly with Frozen itself and still doing as well as it is. Now subtract that factor and you must be deluded to think that BH6 couldn't eat up a nice chunk of that gross pie given its fantastic legs even with the competition. That's of course not to suggest it would gain all 400m of that if they all disappeared, but an extra 100m would be far from out of the question. I've long accepted the fact that there was probably no stopping Frozen from being the pop culture phenomenon that it is, because it lends itself well to  merchandising, music, and many other ways that it could infiltrate pop culture besides just its box office gross. Shrek 2 and Nemo were way bigger at the box office, but there weren't the other methods of pop culture impact as readily available to them as something like Frozen.

 

Frozen however was not  always going to make 400m DOM no matter what at the box office. There certainly could have been some stopping it from being the box office hit it was if it had any decent level of direct competition last Holiday. It was the most barren Holiday in terms of quantity in years for the family market, and that is not up for debate no matter how much you may wish it was. It was Frozen and Dinosaurs during the Holiday period. Free Birds would count if it wasn't a bust before Frozen came out and already more or less done grossing when Frozen released. Also please stop trying to use LEGO as  direct competition for Frozen too. Frozen had made 92% of its gross by the time LEGO was released. That's a terribly inadequate comparison to movies released within a month or so like all these for BH6. You don't see me trying to use Spongebob as proof of why BH6 had so much competition. Just stop being such a fanboy, realize everyone knows Frozen was a huge hit with many fanatic fans, but also know that it got very lucky in terms of box office competition. The end.

 

P.S.: The funny part is I would be arguing this exact same thing even if Frozen was my #1 favorite movie of all time, just cause it's box office logic. My personal opinion of Frozen has no bearing on what I'm arguing here.

Edited December 31, 2014 by MovieMan89

[Melvin Frohike]

Hm...while it is true that some superhero movies really knocked things out of the ballpark such as The Avengers, Guardians of the Galaxy, the Spider Man movies, and the Dark Knight movies, in the past few years, there were other superhero movies featuring characters that were arguably more high profile than any character in the Big Hero 6 comic series that underwhelmed at the domestic box office such as the Thor movies, X-Men: First Class & X-Men: Wolverine, and the first Captain America movie. Big Hero 6's domestic gross is likely to surpass that of the Thor movies, the first Captain America movie, The Amazing Spider Man 2, and exceed or come close to matching the domestic grosses of the X-Men movies.

My point was that it's a superhero movie, a WDAS movie, and a Disney movie all at once--all at the right time--and in addition it has a strong hook in Baymax. $200M DOM is what Disney expects and what I consider a "baseline" (give or take some) for the movie to be considered successful, but honestly I felt that it could and would do quite a bit better, even $250M DOM. It's not over yet and currently looks to get a fair part of the way there from $200M at least, so I'm not feeling much disappointment, especially given the current DOM market, but so far it's not quite as strong as I had expected it to be. If the general state of the market could be blamed, then Big Hero 6's performance would be right on the money, based on expectations, I suppose, but ultimately this is not knowable.

Note that I wasn't predicting $300+M DOM and $1+B WW or anything outrageous. I thought I was being realistic. And once again, for the record I am happy with how it's doing, but there are different ways of looking at this.

 

Also, just considering unadjusted grosses alone, of the 14 movies that were released by Pixar, only six of these movies grossed above $250 million at the domestic box office on their initial runs, two of which were sequels. BH6's domestic gross will probably wind up somewhere between Wall-E's and Brave's domestic grosses. Being Pixar releases and all, I'm genuinely curious as to whether people also felt that Wall-E and Brave failed to surpass domestic box office revenue expectations when they were first released .

Speaking only for myself, while I thought that Wall-E deserved to gross more, I can understand why it didn't--it has the Pixar brand, but it's not the kind of movie that generally has mass appeal, of which Big Hero 6, in my opinion, has considerably more. The same could be said for Ratatouille, for that matter. And as for Brave, I'm actually surprised that it grossed as much as it did because the movie is such a dud on a number of levels (my opinion, but it's hard for me to see it any other way in this case), so based on this it overperformed. An even more extreme case would be Cars 2, which frankly was an awful movie that deserved to flop even though it didn't, making it, too, an overperformer.

 

The thing is, with the exception of Frozen, WDAS hasn't produced a full length animated feature that has cruised comfortably past the $200 million mark at the domestic box office for the past 20 or so years.

I was probably one of the first to point this out, so I definitely consider this a valid perspective. That said, ultimately each case is unique, especially in its time, and the bottom line is that a number of people, myself included, thought that it would have done even better by this point because it seems to have so much going for it.

 

Frozen might have garnered legions of fans and renewed recognition for WDAS among some groups of individuals, but the amount of hype and exposure that Frozen had received could just as easily have turned other cynical/jaded (?) groups of individuals away from the WDAS brand.

This is something I've brought up myself, so it's not as though our thinking is completely different. I was concerned about the backlash effect (a silly but very real human emotional reaction) in addition to Frozen overshadowing Big Hero 6 in the opposite way, given some folks' (especially children's) obsession with it.

 

Thus, I felt that a domestic gross of $200 million was a wild card and just hoped that BH6 could exceed the $200 million mark domestically.

The difference is that I decided to put aside such concerns and bet on potential. Actually, my MO is to have it both ways by establishing a "realistic baseline" prediction to go with a "reasonable" upside prediction. For example, for Japan my baseline was $50M (you can look that up in the BH6 OS thread) with an upside of 100+M, even up to $150M (seems crazy but this movie is tailor-made for Japan in ways that go beyond its superficial trappings, in my opinion). I'd be satisfied with $50M, but if that's all it makes, then it would be slightly disappointing (I'll live, and I won't hold it against the movie). For the DOM market, my baseline is $200M (so is Disney's, I'd imagine), so I'm satisfied with that, but I still think it should have grossed $250M (who knows, maybe it still will, so I haven't thrown in the towel just yet, but it doesn't look like it will). My future predictions for WDAS movies will probably be closer to the $200M DOM baseline, and would have been regardless because I currently don't see as much upside in them (until I can learn more about them, at least).

 

I also wonder what Frozen's final domestic gross would have looked like if its release date had been swapped with Monsters University's summer release date.

I doubt this would have made that much of a difference. Frozen was destined to become the cultural phenomenon that it became, at least in this era. I don't mean Destiny with a capital 'D' (or Fate with a capital 'F'), but because of the movie itself, "Let It Go", and the zeitgeist that the movie captured. For that matter, I thought that Big Hero 6 would capture a diffent zeitgeist, but this apparently didn't happen to any major degree with regard to the public.

 

Although Frozen's whole wintry theme might seem at odds with a summer release date,

On the other hand, the movie probably mentions summer more than winter, and the eternal winter would have made for a nice contrast against the summer in real life, nicely framing the eternal winter spell that Elsa had inadvertantly cast (summer in real life, summer at the start of the movie, eternal winter in the middle, and then summer again to take us back to real-life conditions). In fact, the movie itself slipped in extra little bits of exposition to remind the audience that it was supposed to be summer in Arendelle (e.g. Anna telling Elsa at the party that it was warmer than she had thought it would be and Oaken saying that it was July), so in my opinion it would not have suffered due to a summer release date (and in actuality it did just as well in California where last winter was unusually warm, in stark contrast to the rest of NA).

 

and it would have faced competition from Despicable Me 2,

If Monsters University could still score like it did, then Frozen would not have had a problem.

 

most children also did not need to go to school for at least 3-4 consecutive weeks on end. Could it have surpassed Toy Story 3's and even Shrek 2's unadjusted domestic grosses?

Oh, you meant to ask whether Frozen would have made more.   I don't know, but I doubt that the difference either way would be that great. As for the DOM market, it did sell a couple of million more tickets than Toy Story 3, for what it's worth; the latter had the advantage of opening when 3D was at its hottest, and had a 3D percentage more than double that of Frozen (or anything else released these days).

 

I wonder if this is due in part to the "contrast effect", i.e., that general audiences felt that the other functional alternatives such as POM, Annie or Night at the Museum 3 were really really terrible especially when compared with/contrasted against BH6, and made them all the more likely to eschew repeat viewings/first time viewings of these three family movies in favor of repeat and first time viewings of BH6 over the holiday season. In this unique instance, could it be that "bad" competition helped a "good" movie's box office performance more so than if this "good" movie faced no competition from other family movies?

This certainly is an interesting theory. I think it is possible that all of the December family releases generally got people and their children raring and planning to go to the theater initially, perhaps even delaying/eschewing views/repeat views of BH6, and then switching to BH6 based on WOM and reviews when they actually had to make a decision. That's basically what you said in different words, and it sure seems true-to-life to me.

My basic point earlier was that it's not as simple as competition is bad and no competition is good, and that each scenario is unique, and your theory fits it perfectly for this case.

[MovieMan89]

Seriously, why is it that lack of direct (and timely) competition is universally accepted by nearly everyone who tracks box office as a huge benefit for a big movie, except from the Frozenites only when concerning Frozen?  Bring up that fact and then all of a sudden you clearly must be hating.

[AniNate]

Regardless of my feelings on BH6 or Frozen, I don't care to get hung up on release dates for any film. It's the movie's problem if it can't maintain audience interest when new takers show up.

Edited December 31, 2014 by tribefan695

[Melvin Frohike]

I'll tell you guys what for sure would have caused the film to earn more, more surefire than a Thanksgiving release date: Frozen level lack of direct competition. Annie, Night at the Museum, Penguins, and Into the Woods all went after the exact same target audience this Holiday and will likely combine to over 400m DOM when they're finished.

And accordingly the similar lack of direct competition was, of course, why HTTYD 2 cleaned up at the DOM box office this summer, exceeding even the most optimistic predictions by grossing as much as Monsters University and Despicable Me 2 did last summer combined, amiright? Wait, it actually underperformed? Do you have an explanation for this discrepancy?

 

These legs for this have been downright phenomenal when all the direct competition is factored in.

Its legs improved when the competition started--seems more like a "because of" than an "in spite of" scenario, if anything.

[MovieMan89]

Regardless of my feelings on BH6 or Frozen, I don't care to get hung up on release dates for any film. It's the movie's fault if it's not interesting enough to maintain audience interest when new takers show up..

Not after a certain number of viable competitors in a short time. This movie has held up extremely well as it is, so audiences clearly have been interested. Now subtract four sizable movies that came after its audiences and tell me how exactly it wouldn't have gained anything? 

[MovieMan89]

And accordingly the similar lack of direct competition was, of course, why HTTYD 2 cleaned up at the DOM box office this summer, exceeding even the most optimistic predictions by grossing as much as Monsters University and Despicable Me 2 did last summer combined, amiright? Wait, it actually underperformed? Do you have an explanation for this discrepancy?

 

 

Of course there's an explanation. The interest obviously wasn't there for HTTYD2 in the first place the way many of us thought. Why that is, I don't know but it wasn't. The movie has to strike a chord and connect with audiences in the first place or the competition is irrelevant. I'm guessing you didn't really read my post or you'd know that's not at all what I was arguing. And just for the record, the 3 top grossing movies aimed directly at kids/families this past summer (HTTYD, Maleficent, and TMNT) did in fact gross roughly the same as MU and DM2 combined. So there ya go, the family gross pie between the two summers was of a very similar gross, just split differently. Fits perfectly with what I've argued.

Edited December 31, 2014 by MovieMan89

[AniNate]

Not after a certain number of viable competitors in a short time. This movie has held up extremely well as it is, so audiences clearly have been interested. Now subtract four sizable movies that came after its audiences and tell me how exactly it wouldn't have gained anything? 

 

I don't deny that it may have benefited from a lack of direct competition, but it's still total speculation. Lack of competition doesn't automatically mean great legs.